Arsenii Moon speelt Chopin en Ravel

Arsenii Moon

'Arsenii Moon is an extraordinary virtuoso who knows how to capture the listener's attention with a fascinating and breathtaking story,' says Moon's teacher Sergei Babayan of The Juilliard School in New York. The twenty-something Moon has been playing the piano seriously since the age of six; he is the winner of the prestigious Ferruccio Busoni Competition and records for the Deutsche Grammophon label. All doors are open for this Saint Petersburg native, including those of the Kleine Zaal, where he is making his debut. His program includes Chopin and Ravel, among others, in which challenging technique and deep expression come together. With Ravel explosive and diabolical, with Chopin more restrained: grist to Arsenii Moon's mill. The opening consists of a selection of miniatures by Scriabin.

Chopin and Ravel

Chopin felt most at home in single-movement forms: mazurkas, ballads – long sonatas were not entirely his thing. Yet, in the prime of his relationship with George Sand, he composed the magnificent Third Piano Sonata . The highlight of this work is perhaps the Largo: pure poetry, in which a Polish soul speaks in an almost Italian operatic style. Ravel, too, showed his most poetic side when he wrote: 'It is my ambition to say with notes what a poet expresses in words.' The grotesque and macabre atmosphere of Aloysius Bertrand's collection Gaspard de la nuit served as his source of inspiration.